AZ DoE now leads the nation in denying Evolution

Arizona hasn’t updated its science curriculum standards for public and charter schools in more than 15 years, so a committee of several dozen science teachers has been crafting a new policy over the last year. Turns out, though, when they submitted their plan to the Arizona Department of Education, Superintendent Diane Douglas and her creationist goobers at the agency crossed out or qualified “evolution” whenever it appeared and replaced it with language a little more flexible—language that gives cover to teachers who want to teach evolution as just another story, alongside creationism.
[...]It’s bad enough Arizona has led the nation in defunding education over the last decade; now the Department of Education, led by dominionist nutball Diane Douglas, wants to give students third-rate instruction. Science teachers, people concerned about church-state separation, the Arizona Education Association, and parents who hope to prepare their children for college oppose the changes, as does the National Center for Science Education.

At a recent meeting, Department of Education board members heard from 92-year-old Ed Reitz, who wrote a book explaining how the world has gone to hell since we took god out of the classroom (I guess we’re mighty powerful beings, removing god and all). "The teaching of evolution is something that concerns me because it is a theory and it is not science," he said. Hey crackerjack, a lot of science is theory and vice versa, but theory based on scientific observation. Still, that’s who the Department is listening to, not its own science committee.

The rewriting of reality extends to the Big Bang as well, which will be taught as “just another theory,” alongside the six-day story in Genesis.

The Department of Education’s revisions instead call for teaching our children “theories related to ... the expansion of the universe” – opening the door to Biblical rather than scientific explanations.

Evolution is both a theory and a fact. There is no contradiction there. After all, precisely the same thing is true of, say, gravity. In fact, when it comes to gravity, we have a few competing theories of gravity, to explain the observed fact of gravity.

The theory of evolution, as it currently exists, is our best attempt to explain the observed fact of evolution.

We understand evolution much better than we understand gravity.

The Encyclopedia Britannica: Evolution, or the common descent of all living organisms, is a fact as well-established as the facts that the Earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the Sun.

The 'Britannica' has about a 45-page article on 'Evolution' that goes on to pretty thoroughly document that statement, with evidence from paleontology, embryology, genetics, biogeography, physiology, and so forth and so on.

That's intellectually dishonest and she is uneducated if she doesn't know the definition of 'theory' when applied to science. The term 'biological diversity' is inadequate to describe the emergence and vanishing of species as noted in the fossil record.

If the 'Genesis' story is included in the scientific curriculum, that too is simply dishonest (even if borne of ignorance), as this story has been proven to be false by science itself. None of this religious nonsense could withstand a challenge based on fact or evidence.

That's intellectually dishonest and she is uneducated if she doesn't know the definition of 'theory' when applied to science. The term 'biological diversity' is inadequate to describe the emergence and vanishing of species as noted in the fossil record.

If the 'Genesis' story is included in the scientific curriculum, that too is simply dishonest (even if borne of ignorance), as this story has been proven to be false by science itself. None of this religious nonsense could withstand a challenge based on fact or evidence.

I always ask "If Adam and Eve were the first organisms on Earth, then where are their fossil records? Why are cellular colonies at the bottom of the fossil record instead of Adam and Eve's fossil remains?"

I saw a graph recently that showed how under-developed states like those of the Deep South had trended relative to the more advanced states, like those of the Northeast, in terms of GDP/capita, median incomes, etc. For most of 20th century, the trend was for the under-developed parts to improve faster than the developed parts, causing them to converge. That's what you'd expect, as businesses moved to lower-cost areas to take advantage of that..... similar to how China's been improving faster than the US in recent decades. But the interesting thing is that, within the US, that reversed a few decades ago, and the leading areas actually started to build on their lead. I suppose there are a lot of factors in why that happened, but this kind of thing has to factor in. When a backwards state makes a conscious decision to under-educate their children in order to placate the dark-ages religious sensibilities of their most backwards residents, they set themselves up to have a real handicap competing in the future. Without a decent grounding in evolution theory, you're not going to do well in any life science, and so Arizona is going to wind up with a higher share of its workforce that can't even hope to compete with residents of places like California, New York, or Massachusetts when it comes to, say, biotech research or similar industries that are going to provide some of the most lucrative economic opportunities of the next generation.